Fascinating and Depressing

Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson’s podcast Citations Needed is one of my favorites; they never fail to illuminate their topic, and their research appears to be impeccable. I also like the slightly unsophisticated un-slick audio and editing; podcasting is metastasizing into a big business full of well-funded corporate drones that milk advertising opportunities, so it’s refreshing that there are a few hold-outs that stay resolutely old school. They’re just about the information.

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Keeping My Head Above Water, Modern Times Edition

Often, my gutter-crawling through politics and the history of revolutions, government, racism, and nastiness, leave me so sad and angry that I don’t know what to do. Add on top of it my leg hurting and the clot-buster drugs, which seem to be making me a bit stupid and low-energy, and I’ve got a real motivational crisis. Oh, yeah, and looming over it all is my certainty that species extinction and the collapse of civilization is hurtling toward us at an accelerating rate. “Why bother?” doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable question; trying anything at all seems to be an act of denial.

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Hot House Flowers

One of the side-effects of the recent focus on police shootings in the US, is that outside agencies are starting to track and publish statistics about the police. Those attempts uncover additional layers of horror; under the shit, there’s more shit.

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